Mourning has broken out among fans of the telepathic Louisiana waitress Sookie Stackhouse after author Charlaine Harris announced that next year would see the publication of the final novel in her Southern Vampire Mysteries series.

Harris, whose bestselling books about vampires, werewolves and other supernatural beings in the small southern town of Bon Temps was made into the popular True Blood television series, has previously hinted that she was planning to bring the story to a close. But she made the definitive announcement on her Facebook page yesterday, telling readers that the 13th and final Sookie Stackhouse book, Dead Ever After, would be on sale next May. She immediately drew more than 5,000 "likes" and hundreds of comments from her fans, from: "Say it ain't so!" to "How can you do that to us!"

"I don't have anything left to tell. After the last book, I'll have said everything I have to say about Sookie," Harris said last week. "Really, I think it would be doing readers a disservice to continue writing a character when my heart wasn't in it. I've loved writing Sookie, but if you see the end of the road, you see the end of the road."

Harris's other series include the Harper Connelly books, about a woman who can tell the cause of death for any dead body, the Shakespeare mysteries, about amateur sleuth Lily Bard, and the Aurora Teagarden books, about a mystery-solving Georgian librarian. Her next project will be a graphic novel, Cemetery Girl, a collaboration with author Christopher Golden in which an amnesiac awakes to find herself living in a graveyard.

But for now Harris is mainly concerned with tying up loose ends in Bon Temps for the cast of characters she has followed for 12 years. "I don't know if I can get everything wound up. It just feels like a very big challenge," she told the Houston Press. "It's so hard. I find myself wanting to bring back random people, just so I can say, 'Here they are. Here's what happened.' And then I think, it's not going to be a very cohesive book if I have all these guest appearances. I really have to stick to the core of the book; I can't just throw people in there to give them a wave of the hand. Maybe there'll be an addendum on my website or as an ebook, something where I say, 'This is what happened to Harry Bellefleur!' or 'This is what happened to Tanya.' I don't want to leave anybody frustrated."

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About this article

True Blood author can suck no more out of vampire series

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 04.12 EDT on Wednesday 16 May 2012.
It was last modified at 23.01 EDT on Tuesday 3 June 2014.
It was first published at 04.13 EDT on Wednesday 16 May 2012.